To Hear Buchanan Talk, You'd Think He'd Won At The Polls

Denis Horgan

March 17, 1996|By DENIS HORGAN; Courant Columnist

Let Pat ``Deliverance'' Buchanan lose a few more primaries by the swampy margins he has been invariably losing them by and he'll crown himself The Emperor of The World. The more the guy loses, the bigger become his demands.

For brass, he takes the cake.

Seemingly a hundred primaries ago, with a Super Tuesday and a side order of Yankee Tuesdays thrown in since, Buchanan actually won something. He slipped above a crowded field in New Hampshire -- pulling down fewer votes than he had four years earlier going up against only a sitting president. Earlier, he had received a majority of the mere handful of votes cast in the Louisiana caucuses.

But those were victories, no doubt about it. Since then, he has lost in the South, the West, the North and the East, no doubt about it. He has lost in big states, small states, wide states and narrow ones too. He has won nowhere. No where. ``Lost'' means that in tremendous numbers Republicans went to the polls and, in a fair fight, said ``No Pat No.'' It wasn't even close.

To hear his bluster, though, you'd think he had routed the field with his sorry performance. With martial metaphors galore (which he must have learned at the movies, the closest he came to the military) he threatens and storms at Bob Dole and the Republican Party. He wants his way with the party or else, strutting with the attitude of the man cleaning up after the elephants pass by who figures that the association makes him a pachyderm.

Should he be denied satisfaction with the vice presidential candidate, the platform and, presumably, the convention bunting, Buchanan threatens to take his ``movement'' elsewhere. Maybe the party should point out the ``exit'' sign.

As polite as they want to be and as accommodating as they feel they might have to be, the GOP leaders might very well wonder why they have to take the unending guff from Buchanan -- and where he gets off delivering it.

His ``movement'' flopped. Of late, it has been handed its hat in every primary under the honest sun. Given the choice, the voters have said, ``No thanks.'' Yet here's Pitchfork Pat demanding a veto on the vice presidential choice.

Having lost a score of primaries in a row, which might suggest to someone that the people aren't much buying the message or the messenger, Buchanan acts like Ulysses S. Grant -- and says the victors should surrender to his demands on the platform. Routed in every electoral nook and cranny, he says his alone is the direction of the party -- a party which has rejected him and his increasingly fringe views.

This might almost be grand theater -- General Custer yelling out his demands to the Indians -- but it is a little preposterous and more than a little unseemly. The Republican Party, with all its other challenges, hardly needs to be treated like a chump by a fellow who has demonstrated only a surface-skim level of support within that party.

Demonstrating that a little bravado goes a long way, Buchanan demands full attention in his airy grievance that his political foes have had the audacity to call him a few names: This from a guy who has called his opponents every name in the book, who has pointedly appealed to a thousand fears and manufactured out of thin air bogey men aplenty. Politics is full of give and take but in the matter of name-calling, Buchanan is longer on the giving than the taking.

Still, no one is particularly inclined to bell the scratching cat. Buchanan suggests he'll consider a third party if he doesn't get his way, which is the political equivalent of a kid threatening to hold his breath 'til he gets his way. Instead of treating the threat as so legitimate as to invite the insults to continue, maybe someone should point out to Buchanan that he is nearly irrelevant now and would be totally irrelevant stomping around in the woods as a political militiaman.

It is the party's business to determine its own candidates, to define its platform positions and to chart its own direction. Pat Buchanan, like everyone who stepped forward, deserves a voice in the process. But inescapably, Buchanan and Buchananism were put before the GOP voters for assessment and came up losers.

If he refuses to accept that judgment, that's his problem. But when he huffs and puffs that he must be given more authority than he has earned, someone might simply tell him to take a hike. His act is getting a little old.